What Did We Learn About the Georgia Grand Jury’s Findings?

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“The majority of the Grand Jury believes that perjury may have been committed by one or more witnesses testifying before it,” a panel in Fulton County, Georgia, said in sections of its final report released Thursday. Who do they mean? Between last June, when the special grand jury began hearing evidence related to possible criminal interference in the 2020 Presidential election in Georgia, and the completion of its work, in December, it has, by its own account, heard of evidence “from or involving” seventy-five witnesses, most of whom were “given in person under oath.” Not everything comes willingly or happily. Senator Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, fought his subpoena all the way to the Supreme Court, which only managed to set some limits on what was asked of him; John Eastman, the former law professor who helped Donald Trump come up with a plan for what a federal judge called “a coup in search of a legal theory,” took up the Fifth Amendment when he descended on Georgia . After Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City and Trump’s lawyer, appeared, he said, “I am very happy that I have fulfilled my obligation.” The part about his happiness may be a lie, but it’s not under oath.

So which witness, or witnesses, does the jury think might have committed perjury? That guessing game will continue for a while—only a few pages of the report have been released, with the rest already in the hands of Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney. But perjury isn’t the only potential state charge Trump and his associates have to worry about; others include the criminal solicitation of election fraud. “The allegations are very serious. If charged and convicted, people face prison sentences,” Willis told the Washington Post, in September. Willis began the investigation weeks after a phone call on January 2, 2021, in which President Trump told Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” him by 11,780 votes—one more than Joe Biden’s margin of victory in the state. Failure to do so, he told Raffensperger, would be ” a great danger to you.” Raffensperger, a Republican, did not comply; he was one of the grand jury’s earliest witnesses, and testified for nearly five hours in June.

On Monday, Judge Robert CI McBurney ordered the release of sections of the report—its introduction and conclusion paragraphs and the reference to perjury concerns—he said the sealed portion included “a list of who should (or should not) be sued.” It will be up to Willis to decide whether to accept any such recommendations and actually file charges, and McBurney suggested that releasing the full report before he made that call could have due process implications for potential similarly, the introduction to the report explains that it includes “recommendations on indictments and related laws,” jurors’ votes on each item “in a Yes/No/No format,” footnotes explaining some of the votes, and a full appendix of applicable Georgia laws. It’s possible that all of the impeachment votes ended up being “no” or “shouldn’t,” but it wasn’t like this.

Trump himself, as far as we know, has not appeared before the grand jurors, although this only means he has no opportunity to lie to them in person. (McBurney noted that some of the grand jury’s recommendations involved people who had never appeared before it.) Indeed, it would be ludicrous to say—as a Trump spokesman said Thursday—that the sections of the report released “has nothing to do with the President because President Trump has done nothing wrong.” Witnesses and the evidence the grand jury explored are concerned with one thing he did very wrong: trying to cling to power after losing in an election. And that story, from almost the moment the polls closed on November 3, 2020, focused specifically on Georgia.

The state results are just around the corner. Perhaps Trump can’t believe he’s lost what had been a swing state—or perhaps the proximity made manipulating the results seem feasible. With the support of some very powerful Georgia elected officials, especially Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Trump team has demanded everything it can think of—a recount, an audit, lawsuits. On December 3, 2020, Giuliani appeared at a Georgia State Senate hearing, howling about the fraud. By early December, however, the only effect of those challenges and responses was to further cement the outcome. Some key Republican state officials in Georgia, including Raffensperger, were left with the choice of sticking with Trump or sticking with the numbers right in front of them—and, to their credit, they stuck with the numbers. Governor Brian Kemp, who has been a Trump supporter, demurred when Trump called him on December 5th in an attempt to ask for help in overriding voters by asking state legislators to choose their own voters. (Kemp was also a witness for the grand jury, though he initially resisted his subpoena.)

Georgia has become a key state in the Trump campaign’s voter fraud scheme, a plan to submit “alternative” voter rolls and have Vice-President Mike Pence use them as a pretext to block vote certification in Electoral College at the joint session of Congress on January 6th. As part of the process, at the end of December, Jeffrey Clark, a Justice Department official, prepared a draft letter asking Kemp, again, to call a special session of the state legislature. Trump wanted to name Clark Attorney General—William Barr resigned, after apparently not doing enough to push the story that the election was stolen—but other department officials threatened to quit, and the letter did not ever sent. A fake electoral certificate for Georgia was actually prepared, as were certificates for six other states (Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin); the Trump electors who signed it are known “targets” of Willis’ investigation. (The voters denied any wrongdoing.)

On January 4th, two days after Trump called Raffensperger, he traveled to Georgia for a rally in the city of Dalton. There, he berated the Supreme Court for not helping him deny victory to Biden, warned Pence that he expected him to help stop the electoral count, and told the crowd that they all needed to act “quickly.” ” or they will. lose the country: “They’re not taking this White House; we will fight like hell!” Two days after that came the attack on the Capitol.

Other investigations into Trump and his businesses are underway, of course, including one by Special Counsel Jack Smith, who last week subpoenaed Pence, who apparently did not appear before the Georgia grand jury. (Pence said he would fight Smith’s subpoena “if necessary in the Supreme Court.”) Each inquiry has a unique approach, but there appears to be general agreement on at least one thing. As Georgia grand jurors observed, in part of the report released Thursday, they heard “extensive testimony” about the election fraud allegations pushed by Trump, including from “people who will still claim” that he was robbed. The jurors found, “by a unanimous vote,” that there was nothing to do with it—”no massive fraud” that “could result in the reversal of that election.” Biden won Georgia. And Trump didn’t steal the state. ♦

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